Mrs Rupert Giles
by Kiwikatipo
Summary: What would it be like, if Anya had lived and hooked up with Giles?


Time: December 2003  
Location: London UK

The room was full of woeful mourners dressed in black and dark grey. Giles went over to offer a cup of tea, the panacea to all ills and life's misfortunes, to the young woman who was presumably suffering the most.

"I think it was hugely inconsiderate of Xander to save Buffy's life, losing his own in the gore spattered process in Uganda." Anya stated dry eyed, accepting the tea. "Honest to god, what am I meant to do? His life insurance policy was pitifully inadequate. I'm American on my passport. I don't qualify for any grants or benefits here. And I'm eight months pregnant, from the 'we think the world is going to end, I don't care that you only have one eye, let's have sex one last time on the kitchen floor, who cares about birth control' encounter we had on the Hellmouth. So he was selfish and immature to the end."

"Would you shut your damn mouth?" A grief stricken Willow hissed at Anya. Kennedy drew her weeping girlfriend away consolingly.

"Yes, you're in a difficult situation." Giles sympathized with his ex Magic Box employee. He knew Anya very well, after having worked eight hours a day with her for over a year. He was aware she was hurting deeply inside. "Do you want to go back to America?"

"And survive how, with an infant? Live in some rat infested tenement? I don't want to stay with Xander's parents. His father's a lousy drunk, his mother's an alcoholic victim." Anya drank her tea with a steady hand. "I guess I should give the baby up for adoption. But I don't want to do that. I'll think of something sensible, I always do."

"May I suggest, perhaps… I'm living in my grandmother's house as you know, with three orphan Romanian teenage slayers who were foisted upon me last week. Why not come live with us and be a combination chaperon-housekeeper? You speak Romanian." Giles offered, sitting down beside her, clenching his hands nervously together. "I'm predicting there's going to be a language misunderstanding, one of the ex Bucharest street kids is going to accuse me of improper advances towards her, any day now."

"Thank you, it's nice of you to offer me accommodation out of pity. And we wouldn't see each other much would we?" Anya began nibbling the biscuit that Giles had temptingly placed on the saucer. "You're busy with the Council. Which is good, because you can be very boring often Giles."

"No, we would hardly encounter each other. That's why I'm completely sincere in inviting you to live with us." Giles confirmed. "One thing, my turn to be rudely honest for once, please keep your baby out of my way when it arrives. Never could stand noisy children really. It's why I could never commit to Olivia. You can live in the old servant quarters in the attic."

Time: June 2004

Giles came home from the council early that day. He wandered into the back garden clutching his mug of tea.

Anya had stripped the beds in the household for her weekly wash. She was hanging sheets out to dry on the clothes line in the hot afternoon sun. Her baby daughter was beside her in a wicker basket.

"Nadia's been smoking marijuana in her bedroom again." Anya squatted down to the laundry hamper, pulling up a handful of pillowslips. "I smelled it when I went in and changed the sheets on her bed."

"Dear Lord, obviously the drug rehabilitation program we put her in, was completely ruddy useless." Giles reached into the container of clothes pegs. He passed them to her one at a time.

"I told you it would be." Anya picked up her daughter who had begun to grizzle. Anya sniffed her. "This is the fourth diaper change Alexandra has needed in two hours. I'm taking her into the doctors."

"I'll run you in if you like." Giles didn't want anything to happen to that adorable baby girl of Anya's, even if she did have a pair of lungs on her like her mother sometimes.

Time: November 2004

"For a man in his fifties, that was an incredible sexual performance." Anya disengaged herself from the graceless tangle of limbs, she was entwined in with Giles. They were both partially clothed, sprawled on the living room floor. Anya felt quite giddy from the Herculean effort Giles had put into satisfying her.

"Thank you I think." Giles adjusted his clothing. One minute he was pointing out the iron cord was frayed and Anya could give herself an electric shock. The next minute they were snogging on the carpet. Seven minutes after that, he was inside her, after Anya assuring him she was on the injection, just in case the opportunity to get laid ever came her way once more. This had been her first opportunity since Xander's premature death.

Anya wriggled her jeans back on. "I have to do tedious domestic chores now. Come up to my room tonight. I haven't had sex in bed for a long time and neither have you obviously Giles."

"If we're going to be making love on a regular basis...I hope." Giles wondered if he should be doing this in the first place. But he'd always been fond of Anya in her own annoying way. "Why not call me Rupert?"

Time: August 2005

Location: Lisbon Portugal

"If this isn't loving each other, what is Anya?" Giles pointed out, as they stretched out beside each other in bed that afternoon. The ceiling fan turned lazily overhead. This was day three of an unencumbered holiday they had taken together.

Giles elaborated on his sainthood and high regard for her. "I had to have a very pleasant lunch interrupted by one of your vengeance demon girl friends. Listened to tales of bloodshed, when I'm trying to enjoy a quiet glass of red wine in the sun. Put a smile on my face, trying not to regurgitate my fried octopus, while she recounted her latest tale of male evisceration. You pretended to be interested when we went to the art gallery. Not very well I might add. But you're getting far better at the falseness that oils the progress of human discourse."

"Yes, the pictures had faded, they were dusty. They were better when they were new in the sixteenth century. Everything's better new Rupert. I don't know why people like talking about the good old days so much. There was no sanitation, humans died constantly, from infected scratches or chest infections." Anya reached over for the hotel telephone. "That reminds me, I want to make sure Alexandra's still alive."

"Dear, I can guarantee she will be. But please put your mind at rest, then let's make love, the way we were going to in the first place, before we got side tracked. And Anya I do love you." Giles propped his head up on the enormous bolstered pillow behind him, and realized he truly did.

Time: November 2006  
Location: London UK

"Don't leave me Rupert." Anya's eyes filled with frightened tears. She couldn't bear it if he went away, she had come to depend on him. 

"Stop bloody overreacting Anya. I said the opportunity to emigrate to Melbourne was there, if 'we' wanted it." Giles waved the letter in her face in an exasperated manner. "I'm getting too long in the tooth to prance around cemeteries with teenage girls, staking vampires. This chance to be principal at the Antipodean New Watchers Council Co-ed Academy, is too good to pass up."

Giles could see Anya was starting to calm down. She was now going to become loudly excited again unfortunately. "I rather thought we could get married before we went over in any case. No long engagements. I thought you might be wary of that. And I'd prefer to get married in a registry office, if it's all the same to you. And Alexandra can stop calling me Giles, start calling me Daddy."

Time : Now  
Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

The lawns in front of everyone's houses were dead and brown. Grass watering banned. Smoke from the bush fires throughout the State hung in the air. The sun obscured through a gray haze. Occasionally smoke detectors in office buildings in the central business district went off because of it.

The worst thing about the State of Victoria's water restrictions, because of the ten year drought in Anya's opinion, was that she and Giles couldn't risk having sex in the shower. If your water usage was over the limit, you got heavily fined.

Anya sat in the front seat of her car driving. This was the kindergarten/preschool open day for prospective parents. Three year old Alexandra was now of the age to attend 'kinder' as it was called in Australia.

Giles had unexpectedly volunteered to accompany them. He had launched into his step father role most conscientiously. Telling Anya he had decided to bloody grow up finally.

He even was singing along to 'old Mac Donald had a farm' with Alexandra, on the CD playing in the car stereo. Giles made quite convincing duck noises Anya complimented him.

Who would suspect the sundress clad, sunglasses wearing woman in her late twenties sitting beside Giles, was a thousand year old ex vengeance demon? Giles sometimes forgot that himself these days.

Anya parked her car in front of the kinder. There were shade cloth sails erected over the children's play area. Gum trees giving off sweet clean fragrance in the shimmering mid morning heat. Giles took Alexandra out of her car seat.

The Giles family walked up the mosaic tiled path. Other parents and toddlers were waiting outside for the tour to start. Giles and Anya introduced themselves. They weren't the only immigrants present. There was a family newly arrived from South Africa, and a mother and son from New Zealand.

Anya laughed and swapped furniture shipping horror stories with these mums. Giles felt like Methuselah, amongst the other suntanned dads, in their late twenties and early thirties. But he was very relieved for her sake, Anya was completely blending in to her new environment.

A matronly looking woman beckoned them in. Stickers with everyone's first names were handed out. 'Rupert' and Anya walked into the cloakroom. AFL, Spiderman and Barbie bags hung on low to the ground hooks.

The Lilliputian toilets were shown and examined. The morning tea roster, where each family had to provide a plate of cut up fruit once a week, was explained. No chips, no sweets, no soft drinks, were allowed to be brought in for snacks. Sunblock had to be administered before the child left from home. A sun hat must be included in their bags, along with a change of clothes.

The prospective parents were taken into the main room. It was a munchkin hive of activity. Organized chaos. Giles and two other dads found themselves irresistibly drawn to the train set on the floor.

Anya stopped dead in her tracks. "Holy Moley! What is 'that' doing in a room full of defenseless short children!" she screeched.

The other parents stopped chatting and stared at her. They searched worriedly around for a poisonous spider perhaps, Anya must have discovered had sneaked inside.

"And that over there." Anya pointed to something no one else could spot was a problem. "The room is full of them. They're everywhere! Everywhere!"

"Oh dear lord." Giles went over to his wife, seeing the kinder world through the ex vengeance demon's eyes.

There was the library corner shelf displaying Peter Rabbit books, there was the alphabet chart stretched on the wall beneath the ceiling. K was for kangaroo and W was for wombat definitely 'Down Under' but R was for rabbit. There was the plastic rabbit, sand play bucket. There was even a stuffed toy rabbit in the miniature play house.

"Bunnies! Bunnies!" Anya clutched Giles t-shirt sleeve in anguish.

"You have to excuse my wife, she's er, she's Californian." Giles announced inspired, to the stunned parents and kinder staff.

Everyone relaxed.

"Righto Rupert mate." Chuckled an Aussie dad, no longer mystified by Anya's outburst. "That explains it then. We all thought Anya was bloody insane there for a second."


End file.
